Why does Dana Scully not believe in aliens or any of the other weirdness in the x-files?
Why does Dana Scully not believe in aliens or any of the other weirdness in the x-files?
Every week there's a new monster (MOTW) where all the evidence for outsiders disappears, or there's the mythology where the government is covering it up.
I'm a huge skeptic in almost everything, but if I saw what she saw, I would clearly believe. That's plenty of evidence for me, and I'm an actual scientist (well PhD engineer. I definitely did real science in school though)
The shit's clearly real in their universe.
(Sorry, just been watching the first season of the x-files for the past few weeks)
The trouble is, we, the viewers, get a god's eye view of the action. We see that the monsters are real, and experience every magical moment of proof. Scully is a scientist plucked from our world and placed in Mulder's world of mystery. In our world, magic does not exist.
We experience weird and unexplained things all the time, and every single time there is a rational, scientific explanation for the evidence. UAPs actually are weather balloons and experimental aircraft. Mexican alien mummies are just plaster cast hoaxes. The guys who had a dead bigfoot in a cooler were lying for attention. Scully, in our world, would be correct every week, and we have a lot more Mulders than we care to think about.
Scully is a scientist. She does not dismiss that there are things we don't know. She dismisses the fantastical explanations presented without evidence, and we see week after week that Mulder doesn't have evidence. In the show, there are shadowy forces deliberately destroying evidence and disposing of bodies to keep secrets, always just outside Dana's peripheral vision. From our seats in front of the TV, we can see them, but she doesn't.
So when she sees something she cannot explain, she assumes that it is consistent with everything else she knows, everything we know in the real world. Fantastical experiences have natural, mundane explanations, even if we can't see them. Coincidence, hallucination, imagination, pareidolia, smoke and mirrors, misdirection, and hoaxes. If you see a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, you may never know how he did it, but you don't assume martians created a wormhole in the hat and wear bunny costumes. That's what Mulder sounds like to Scully at first. It just so happens, in this show, that Mulder is dead on balls accurate.
It's just four paragraphs, and their content is rather clear. TL;DR:
Fair enough. Just know one thing. The unconscious mind seems to be not just incredibly powerful, but reality-defying to the point that myself and my dad have gotten information related to events we would not experience until years later in dreams, and in general lucid dreams are often stranger than fiction.
You don't have to believe anything, I'm just pointing out oneirology (study of dreams, and in an actual scientific manner rather than something shady like astrology) is both a real field of study and like trying to catalogue all the different ways lightning can be put in a jar; frustratingly resistant to the scientific method.
And that's just in anthopological and psychological fields, what about the bottom of the ocean or the depths of space? It's unlikely there's anything truly alien or magic on other worlds or in deep ocean water but so is the presence of life at all. In short, we might also be living in a world which isn't as realistic as we've been led to believe reality is.
The thing is, what we've dubbed "realistic" is things that are consistent with previous observation, and our best models of reality. We've so far never once, let alone frequently, seen incontrovertible proof of life from Extra Terrestrial origin, we never see real life vampires and when people die they tend to stay dead and eventually rot rather than becoming ghosts. Because of that, we consider phenomena that mostly follows this trend to be "realistic" or rather just, real.
Sometimes there's things that were simply not observed or not accounted for in our models before, but we'll experience them in a way that is frequent enough or resistant enough to being explained through existing models, that we have to update our understanding of reality. After that future experiences with phenomena that are explainable through the lens of our experiences and latest models of reality become the new "realistic". From that, we can't really live in an "unrealistic" universe because realistic is just whatever is "real" and when we find something provably new, it becomes the new "real". If vampires started popping up all over the place or even just one was discovered and provably had different biology from human beings that enabled the ability to live eternally or suck blood through specially adapted teeth, then ultimately that would just become normal. Until they do though, it's in general best to reckon using our collective experience and understanding of reality which mostly precludes vampires or premonitions as possibilities.